Desert Island Discs is one of Radio 4's most popular and enduring programmes. Created by Roy Plomley in 1942, the format is simple: each week a guest is invited by Sue Lawley to choose the eight records they would take with them to a desert island.

"Lawley's consensual, almost sensual probing, producing an ambiguous bond like that between hostage and hostage-taker, is ... a masterpiece of technique." The Sunday Times 17 March 1996

PROGRAMME DETAILS

Sunday 20 OctoberRepeated Friday 25 October

Carl Djerassipicture courtesy Oxford University Press

Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna to an Austrian mother and Bulgarian father. Both parents were involved in the medical profession and, growing up surrounded by medical paraphernalia, he assumed that he would become a doctor. For the first four years of his schooling in Austria, he attended a girls' school as the boys school was full. He says "women are much more important than men, in my life. I mean, I enjoyed it, I'm not complaining at all!"

He didn't start studying science until his mid-teens and the outbreak of war meant a move to America, where he attended a pre-medical course at college. He soon became interested in organic chemistry and focussed on this subject for his PhD.

Whilst working at a pharmaceutical company he was involved in two important discoveries. The synthesis of cortisone from plant material was, at that time, the most competitive and difficult project amongst chemists. Cortisone was considered a wonder drug with the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, inflammation and eczema.

The other discovery was the creation of a progesterone that could be orally active - aimed at treating menstrual disorders and infertility. It was realised that it could be used as a contraceptive but, as Carl says: "in the 1950s contraception was not high on the priority list. Pharmaceutical companies, with one exception, were not interested in that field. The population explosion, these concepts, that did not come about until ten years later". It wasn't until 1960 that it was approved by the FDA as a contraceptive and became the Pill.

Carl spent the next few years working in research and universities. He has also published five novels, three plays, a book of short stories, an autobiography and a memoir and is still writing. He describes a lot of his work as science in fiction - not science fiction - which explores aspects of scientific behaviour and of scientific facts. As he says "Disguising them in the cloak of fiction, it is possible to illustrate ethical dilemmas that frequently are not raised for reasons of discretion, embarrassment, or fear of retribution".